Adept Marketing Blog

Reputation Management: Why Businesses Can't Ignore Online Reviews

Lincoln Rinehart — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 18:34:37 GMT

For many customers, online reviews matter as much as personal recommendations. Learn how you can generate positive online reviews to win more customers.

When a user searches online for a local business, the first thing they will see is a star rating, based on the reviews that previous customers of that business have left. For most searchers, this is a critical step in their decision process:

86% of customers read reviews for online businesses
91% of customers between the ages of 18 and 35 trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
57% of customers only use a business if it has 4 or more stars

For many local businesses, these stats are daunting, because obtaining online reviews and ensuring the majority of reviews are positive feels uncontrollable. But as the influence of online reviews continues to grow, all businesses must have a strategy in place to manage their online reputation.

If you own or manage some aspect of a local business, keep reading to learn how to approach three critical aspects of online reputation management:

Best practices for generating online reviews
Strategy for generating positive reviews
Dealing with negative reviews

How to Encourage Customers to Write Reviews

In many ways, your strategy for obtaining online reviews can be weaved into your existing business or marketing activities. For example, it can be as simple as putting a short link to leave a Google review on your receipts, or adding a call-to-action to a monthly newsletter if you have one. If you have customer service representatives who follow up with customers by email, this is another opportunity to include a link.

One of the most effective and rewarding approaches is to simply ask customers in person. Ask them how their experience was and encourage them to write about it online. Make it a habit amongst your customer representatives to request or at least mention the ability for customers to leave an online review.

Of course, the best strategy is simply having excellent customer service. Ensuring that every customer is treated well and leaves with a smile on their face is the most important thing for not only improving your star rating, but for keeping your business running.

Getting Strategic with Online Reviews

If you're starting with little or no online reviews, then obtaining more reviews is definitely a priority. But the unfortunate truth is that customers are far more likely to leave a review for a negative experience than for a positive experience. As a result, ensuring that you generate positive reviews requires a more intentional strategy.

A great place to start is to approach loyal customers or those who are obviously very satisfied with their experience.

When it comes to the timing of asking for a review, it depends on your business. With a traditional retail business where the customer journey is short, asking immediately is recommended. For businesses where the customer journey is longer, such as a B2B company or a multi-step consumer service (e.g., home remodeling), you can extend this a little further and ask after 1-2 weeks.

One key thing to remember is that you are not allowed to incentivize customers to leave positive reviews. Entities such as Google and Yelp will be able to identify these reviews and subsequently filter them out, and your business may experience penalties as a result. However, you can incentivize your employees to provide exceptional service and ask customers for review, and you may reward them if their name is mentioned in the review.

Handling Negative Online Reviews

Every business at one point or another is bound to get a negative review. As mentioned previously, customers who feel their experience with a business was in any way negative are more likely to leave a review. And even one bad review, left untouched, can prevent a customer from purchasing your product or visiting your store.

No matter how bad the review is, you absolutely should respond to it. Take an apologetic tone and do your best to remedy the situation. Under no circumstances should you argue with the customer, point fingers, or become combative in any way. If you are able to fix the situation that caused the customer to leave a negative review, often that person will update their review for the better. That said, don't compose your response with the expectation that the customer will change their review.

Remember: Online Reviews Aren't Going Away

Managing your business's reputation online is always going to be critical. Review platforms like Google and Yelp have become so powerful and pervasive, to the point where many customers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. Simply put, you can't ignore or underestimate the impact of what customers say about you online.

As you think about your strategy for generating reviews, remember that you know your customers best. If you don't know which of the above methods will work best, test a handful of them in small batches before making any a standard practice for all customers.

Ultimately, don't let customer reviews scare you. At the end of the day, as long as you provide exceptional customer service and create a welcoming, positive environment, generating and maintaining a good reputation online should come easily.

The Inevitable Marketing Toe-Dip

dwalton@marketingadept.com (Danielle Walton) — Mon, 06 May 2019 17:56:43 GMT

Adept co-founder Danielle Walton examines the marketing "toe-dip" phenomenon and why it sets up marketing for failure.

Originally published in Columbus CEO on March 29, 2019.

The inevitable marketing toe-dip. Until recently, I’m not sure I actually recognized it as a thing.

What is it? It’s when business leaders decide to do digital marketing, and begin evaluating how to test out “marketing" with as little risk as possible.

After running a digital marketing agency for 10 years, this pattern of business leaders toe-dipping to avoid risk became more and more apparent. We began to wonder why this approach is so prevalent. So we commissioned a research project to evaluate the perceptions of business leaders when it comes to digital marketing. The research revealed that most business leaders

feel challenged with understanding digital marketing
are concerned about the upfront costs to onboard an agency
do not understand how to measure it
believe that digital channels aren’t applicable to their industry
lack a defined marketing strategy tied to business goals

Based on this set of beliefs, it became clear why a business leader would toe-dip. The unknown is scary and can be costly. But here are the inherent flaws with that approach when it comes to marketing:

Knowing your customer is critical. Effective marketing requires an understanding of who your customer is and why they buy from you. Most business leaders think they know this; however, in most cases, those assumptions are not correct. Marketing without clear customer insights is toe-dipping and typically leads to failure.
Good data is necessary to make good decisions. Not only does the marketing process take time, but the accumulation of data is critical for making good decisions. Imagine if every person who has successfully lost weight said, “if the data doesn’t show that I am losing 10 pounds every month for the first three months, then it’s clear it doesn’t work for me.” There is something to be said for allowing data to accumulate over a period of time before final decisions are made. Toe-dips do not allow for this.
Expertise matters. Marketing channels are often labeled as unsuccessful and tossed to the curb simply because the new intern tried "that social media thing and it didn’t work” or “the agency ran paid advertising and it didn’t work.” It is a disservice to test a marketing channel one time with one approach or one provider and decide the channel doesn’t “work” in your industry. Toe-dips are often a one-time gig set-up to fail.
It’s never “one thing.” We all look for the “silver bullet” when in reality we know it doesn’t exist. It is rare that one marketing channel works perfectly by itself to grow a business. Typically it requires multiple channels working together to support the path to purchase. Toe-dips don’t allow for this approach.

At Adept, we believe it’s time to change the odds. It’s time to remove the toe-dip by sharing the risk with our clients, by partnering to achieve the desired goals together and guaranteeing the results. We won’t work with clients if we don’t believe digital marketing will work for them. Because, in our experience, that is the only way to get what we all really want: growth.

Why Business Leaders Avoid Change—And What It Costs

Adept — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 21:07:31 GMT

Learn why avoiding digital marketing ultimately delays long-term business growth.

Each year, we meet with executives from more than 200 businesses who are interested in learning more about how digital marketing could support their growth goals. Of that 200, typically less than half of those business’ actually end up taking action and invest in a digital marketing program.

Why is this the case? Our own experience combined with research we commissioned indicates a few reasons: they’re turned off by the time & financial investment marketing will take; business executives think there’s another way to more efficiently generate business growth, they don’t understand it or most commonly, they don’t want to change.

We get it - change can feel risky. It often seems easier to keep doing what has always been done instead of veering away from the status quo. The truth is, however, that keeping the status quo hurts businesses. In today’s environment the status quo means ignoring trends, data, and consequences that impact business growth.

Technology has changed over the past several decades, and as a result, so has the way we purchase products and services. In 2008, ecommerce sales made up 3.6% of overall retail sales in the United States. In 2018, that percentage was 9.8%. This represents a 500% increase in ecommerce sales as a percentage of retail sales in just 10 years - and the number is only projected to grow.

The impact of technology is not exclusive to consumer goods & online sales. It’s affecting business products & services too, in different ways. Cold calling used to be the sales tactic to use when a business needed to fill its pipeline; today, thanks to caller ID and the ability to find information online at the click of a button, 90% of B2B decision makers won’t take a cold call. A prospect who may have responded positively to your cold call decades ago now has done 80% of the research process to support their business decision before ever getting in touch with you - all thanks to the internet. The onus is now on sales & marketing to provide critical information to a potential customer before they ever think to ask for it.

This is why, when it comes to marketing, doing nothing means that you are missing opportunities to reach more of your target customers and support their path to purchase.

What are these missed opportunities costing you exactly? To find out, answer these three questions:

What are your business goals and revenue targets this year?
How many new customers do you need to meet those goals?
How many customers will you gain if you just keep doing what you did during the last fiscal year?

Subtract your answer to the third question from your answer to the second question—therein is the cost of keeping the status quo.

The constantly changing nature of technology and its impacts on consumer behavior necessitate taking actions that challenge us. Change is never easy or comfortable, but being able to adapt is a key ingredient to generating true business growth. We’ve seen digital marketing drive results for companies who were initially skeptical of the value digital can bring to their business; that’s why we’re so passionate about helping business leaders overcome the fear of change.

Google Shopping Ads Optimization: Using Campaign Structure to Increase Product Revenue

Adept — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 21:34:41 GMT

Key to any ecommerce marketing plan is the use of Google Shopping ads to promote products online. Learn how businesses can optimize Google Shopping Ads using campaign structure optimizations.

For ecommerce retailers of all sizes, Google Shopping Ads is a paid media tactic that must be considered. These days, shopping ads make up the vast majority of spend on Google's platform - up to 76% (source).

The reason for this is that shopping ads generate far more clicks than typical text ads. Users engage with shopping ads more frequently than other ad types, to the point that 85% of overall clicks on Google's ad platforms are attributed to shopping ads.

If you own a company that sells products online or is considering launching an ecommerce channel, it is important to understand how to best set up Google Shopping campaigns for success. Managing these ads requires a different approach than the traditional Google Ads model in which companies enter specific keywords for which their ads should appear; the reason for this is that shopping campaigns are built off of what is called a product feed. With shopping ads, Google determines a match between a product search and your feed.

For example, if you have a product called "Black Leather Wallet" in your feed, Google may determine this matches to someone searching for "Black Bifold Wallet", and show your ad for that query.

There are three main ways to optimize Google Shopping campaigns:

Campaign Structure: How campaigns are set up in relation to each other.
Feed-Side Changes: Edits to the products in your feed, such as changes to titles & descriptions
Bid & budget management: Day-to-day optimization of product bids

Without a strong approach to each of these components, companies are at risk of wasting time and money on campaigns that do not drive the meaningful results they are looking for.

Our focus here is on Campaign Structure, which is essentially making sure that campaigns are set up in a way that drive a user's search query to the right product for the right search.

One of Adept's clients is a luxury leather goods retailer. For this client, our team analyzed query data from past campaigns and found that a small percentage – just 9% of user queries – were driving 56% of overall transactions. The team recognized that they could isolate these specific queries and try to drive as much traffic to them as possible.

With a campaign structure that doesn't allow for positive keyword targeting (i.e., targeting specific keywords), this is more difficult than it sounds. What we had to do for this client was set up two campaigns: instead of using positive keyword targeting, we had to use negative keywords - terms that Google should not show a particular ad for.

We arranged the campaigns and their negative keywords in such a way that would send user search queries to one campaign or the other. For branded queries, we pushed as much budget as we could to the user that was most likely to take an action once on the website. The rest of the budget was allocated to the campaign with the goal of new customer acquisition, setting the foundation for long-term health of the program.

After launching these campaigns, we saw immediate successes on site:

39% improvement in bounce rate
26% increase in conversion rate
20% increase in pages per session
56% increase in length of time on-site

The most important result aligns with the core KPI for this campaign, which was to increase revenue. We achieved this by increasing revenue 18% year over year, while increasing spend on marketing only 1%.

Of course, it is important to note that just because a company has found success with one campaign segmentation type doesn’t mean that this is going to be the solution forever. User habits change very frequently—take mobile as an example. Five years ago, brands struggled to encourage users to convert on mobile devices. Now, more than 40% of online transactions are made on a mobile device (source).

On top of that, new products by new competitors may enter the market at any time; this may increase click costs because if competitors are bidding on products similar to yours. And it's not just competitors that influence changes in strategy: Google moves the goalpost all the time, releasing new ad formats and changing the way that their current products work.

The key to maximizing the return on investment for Google Shopping campaigns is ultimately to maintain strong industry knowledge and review your customer data regularly. Using these insights to make decisions will help ensure that your business serves the right products to the right people, at the right time.

Continuing the Momentum for 2019: Our Partnership with The Furniture Bank of Central Ohio

Justin Spring and Danielle Walton — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 20:17:46 GMT

Learn why Adept Gives is continuing its relationship with The Furniture Bank of Central Ohio in 2019.

In 2018, we launched a “philanthropy experiment” of sorts at Adept Marketing. Rather than engage in our typical volunteer days and financial giving throughout the year, we launched Adept Gives with the goal of achieving a greater, more sustainable impact by doing what we do best and helping a deserving nonprofit grow.

Our vision was simple: through Adept Gives, we would select a nonprofit to “adopt” and work with them over the course of the year like we would any other client. We set aside a pro bono budget of $50,000 and developed an application process to look for a nonprofit partner we could help further their growth goals.

We kicked off 2018 by choosing The Furniture Bank of Central Ohio as our inaugural Adept Gives partner. And now reflecting on the year, the relationship has been even more mutually beneficial than we could have imagined.

Since February, our team at Adept has been working with Steve Votaw, president of The Furniture Bank of Central Ohio, and his team. Just like any client, we immersed ourselves in learning about their goals, their strengths, their challenges and why they do what they do. It has been inspiring to see their work in action – helping those in need have access to furniture for their homes so families literally have beds to sleep in, or a dining table to eat meals together.

We’re proud of the work we have done together this year. We created a video that truly captures the essence and impact of the Furniture Bank, and we’re in the process of making some major enhancements to the website – improvements that will help people understand exactly what the Furniture Bank does and find more ways to get involved either through donations or volunteering.

It’s been especially rewarding to hear how our work with the Furniture Bank is helping them build and develop long-term capacity. As Steve Votaw told us, “Thanks to the experienced marketing specialists at Adept, we have expanded our marketing capabilities to increase our visibility in the community. Working with the team has helped us to think more strategically about marketing and its impact.”

We know our work with the Furniture Bank is not done yet. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce a continued partnership with the organization in 2019. This will allow us to build on the momentum we started this year, developing and executing strategies designed to build brand awareness of the Furniture Bank and use our expertise in digital marketing to help increase financial and furniture donations.

As business owners, we have always felt a responsibility to give back to the community. And it has been so rewarding to partner with the Furniture Bank and have our work play a small role in their mission of helping people in need. We’re looking forward to continuing to grow together in 2019.

How Closed-Loop Reporting Aligns Sales and Marketing Efforts for Business Growth

Anna Crabill and Robby Herbst — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 14:34:12 GMT

Learn how closed-loop reporting can align your marketing and sales teams to identify what marketing tactics are working and how to generate more quality leads.

If you are a business owner, you know there are many things needed to achieve business growth – two of them being effective marketing and efficient sales.

While marketing and sales may go hand-in-hand, in many businesses these teams operate in silos. Often, the marketing team is responsible for building awareness amongst potential customers and driving leads, while the sales team works to convert those leads into actual customers and revenue for the business.

The challenge for many business owners, however, is knowing what marketing tactics are delivering ROI in reaching potential customers and converting to quantifiable sales.

One solution to this challenge is closed-loop reporting, a tactic that brings marketing and sales teams together to collect data on where revenue and leads are coming from, and use that data to prioritize and shift resources to marketing efforts that actually work. In other words, these efforts help “close the loop” between marketing and sales and help business owners decide how to best allocate marketing resources to achieve a quantifiable ROI.

Why Closed-Loop Reporting is Important

Let’s say you are a professional services company, such as an accounting firm. You’re likely using all the big channels to market online – organic, paid, social media, email marketing, and more. You are successfully analyzing metrics month to month or year over year, but ultimately you have a hard time answering questions like “how many sales came from our paid social efforts?” or “how many clients did we acquire as a result of an email campaign?”

Closed-loop reporting does exactly that. It answers the question of where sales and leads are coming from, so marketers can prioritize and make more informed decisions about how and where to allocate resources, based on channels that are truly bringing in leads and generating revenue.

Many organizations and marketers don’t use closed-loop reporting because it’s intimidating. Setting up all the tracking systems and data so it can be easily monitored and analyzed sounds, on the surface, like a massive undertaking. But the reality is it’s not as hard as you think.

Ultimately, it comes down to tracking both marketing and sales efforts in one place, so the data can show the entire path from marketing qualified lead, to sales qualified lead to eventually becoming a customer.

Here’s what goes in to getting started with closed-loop reporting:

Define your goals. This is a step that should be part of every marketing campaign. For closed-loop reporting to be successful, it’s important to establish goals specific to lead generation and revenue/growth for the coming years.
Identify the data you have. Before you can set up any kind of process to track or analyze data, you first need to determine what data you currently have to work with, and what holes or clean-up needs to be done. This includes checking that the tracking codes on your website are properly implemented, auditing what Google Analytics (or your marketing analytics platform) is – and isn’t – reporting, and ensuring that the framework is in place to correctly track the actions you want to monitor.
Map the data. Once the goals and data sources are identified and correctly tracking, the closed-loop reporting process is set up using a marketing automation tool (such as HubSpot) or a manual method.
Track the data and analyze results. When closed-loop reporting is in place, monitoring the results on a consistent basis can provide both a short-term snapshot view of data as well as a long-term “big picture” view.

Implementing closed-loop reporting can help business owners of all types truly know the impact marketing efforts are having on sales and business growth. In one example, a healthcare client was in the process of implementing a campaign with a heavy focus on paid social media optimizations. An analysis of the data from closed-loop reporting revealed that the company’s qualified leads were, in fact, coming through organic, not paid social media efforts. As a result, the company prioritized adjusting the strategy of the campaign to ensure social media brought in the same quality leads as the organic
strategy.

While there are many ways to track and measure marketing and sales tactics, closed-loop reporting is unique because it provides complete visibility into the performance of each channel, allowing companies to maximize marketing efforts based on that data.

If you would like to learn more about how Adept can help your business set up a system for closed-loop reporting, get in touch with us.

Why Video Should Be A Part of Your Marketing Strategy

Adept — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 19:42:13 GMT

Video is a powerful tool for businesses of all kinds. Learn why and how video should be made part of your marketing mix.

Video consumption and its effectiveness in marketing are rising proportionally. Current research demonstrates that 55% of people watch videos online every day, and 80% of customers remember a video that they’ve watched in the past month. Even more astounding is video is projected to account for 80% of all internet traffic by 2019.

As a result, more and more brands are utilizing video as a marketing tool - 63% of businesses, to be precise. However, when this topic comes up with small-to-medium size business owners, we at Adept Marketing often hear a recurring sentiment: “video is great, but it doesn’t make sense for my business.”

If you’ve found yourself thinking that way about your own business, you may want to reconsider: as technology evolves, the costs and equipment needs that used to make video production much more expensive are now within reach for businesses of all sizes. Making a quality video without a full production crew might have been challenging in the 80’s and 90’s, but in 2018, it can be done with a much lower investment - especially when looking at how impactful video content is.

In this post, we’ll discuss a number of reasons why video is key to marketing for businesses of all sizes.

From Gen Z to Grandma, Everyone’s Watching Video

Widespread online video consumption applies to all age groups. As you might predict, Gen Z and Millennials consume the most video content, averaging just over an hour a day spent on watching videos online. But even adults over the age of 60 spend nearly four hours per week viewing online videos.

Brand Awareness

Whether your business is brand new to the market or has 100 years to its name, there is always a need to inform and educate potential buyers about your brand. There are a variety of marketing tactics that you can use to get the word out like social media advertising or placing ads across relevant websites. But while all of these channels have proven successful at lifting brand recognition, if you add video to the equation, their effectiveness heightens significantly:

Digital ads with videos drive up to 60% more conversions than those without.
65% of ad impressions on Instagram are a result of video content.
Facebook compiled a case study about Pair of Thieves, an ecommerce apparel retailer who ran a campaign featuring video ads on Facebook and Instagram. Compared with prior campaigns that did not include video, the campaign saw an 8.3x increase in online sales, and a 12.2x increase in website traffic.

Nurturing Potential Customers

The first time a potential buyer visits your website, it’s unlikely that they are going to ask for a quote or make a purchase. This is especially true if your product or service has a high transaction value. They are more likely to sign up for a newsletter or download a piece of content. This is where lead nurturing comes into play: brands must remind prospective customers they exist while the customer is making purchasing decisions.

A common and effective nurturing tactic is email. With video, email marketing drives even better results:

Not only does including the word “video” in your email subject line boost open rates by 19%, simply adding a video to marketing emails can boost click-through rates by as much as 200-300%.
In one case study, rental unit company Extra Space Storage found that incorporating videos into their emails increased conversion rate by 50%, and rentals of storage units by 23%.

Drive Home The Sale

If you are spending money to drive users back to a landing page for a specific product or service, adding video to that page is a great strategy to improve your ROI:

64% of customers are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video about it.
Shoe retailer Zappos certainly saw the benefits of including video content on their product landing pages, to the tune of a 30% increase in conversions.

Get Your Customers to Buy Again - and Tell Their Friends

It costs five times as much to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one, which is why it is important for brands to continue to communicate with and drive loyalty amongst existing customers. Tactics used for outreach to existing customers typically include email (which we’ve already discussed the effectiveness of) and organic (non-paid) social media. At this point, you’ve probably already guessed that video content works wonders on organic social:

On average, Facebook videos receive 135% more organic reach than photos.
Meanwhile, on Twitter, videos are 6x more likely to be retweeted than photos, and 3x more likely than GIFs.
Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.

It Benefits Everyone, Even B2B

We’ve heard hesitation to adopt video from many of our business-to-business clients, which we can understand; on the surface, video may seem like a no-brainer for consumer products and ecommerce brands, whereas those selling to other businesses think it’s unnecessary. However, the data says otherwise:

74% of B2B marketers have found that video converts better than other content types.
96% of B2B organizations use video in some capacity in their marketing campaigns.
When text and video are available on the same page, 59% of senior executives say they prefer to watch the video.

If you’re seeing these facts and wondering what this all means, it is best summarized this way:

Not having video as part of your business’s marketing strategy would be like not having a website.

That may seem intimidating to small business owners, but it can’t be emphasized enough: creating quality videos is more affordable than ever. At Adept, we provide our video production capabilities to clients across the board, from small local businesses to large national brands.

Our advice: If you want to show up where your potential customers are looking for your product/services, capture their attention, and keep up with your competitors, you need to invest in video.

Want to learn more? See how Adept approaches video production here. Or, if you would like to learn more about how Adept makes video a part of your marketing strategy, contact us.

Sources:

Local SEO: What Every Business Owner Needs to Know

Lincoln Rinehart — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 20:07:12 GMT

Local SEO is a powerful strategy that is often overlooked. Learn what it takes to get started.

If you’re a business owner, you may have heard the term “local SEO”. But what is it, and what does it mean for your business? This article covers the basics every business owner should understand about local SEO and the impact it can have on your bottom line.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is a segment of Search Engine Optimization that focuses on optimizing web presence to garner organic website traffic, attract new customers, increase search visibility and promote business growth within a specific locality. Local SEO is particularly effective for consumer goods & services businesses that rely on foot traffic, such a restaurants, hair salons, retail stores, and medical practices.

Google estimates that up to 78% of mobile searches with local intent (e.g., “restaurants in columbus”) result in offline purchases, with 18% of those searches resulting in a sale on the same day (source). The key takeaway: local search optimization drives revenue.

This post will cover the basic components of a local SEO strategy, including:

What it means to rank locally, and how to get there
On-site optimizations to support local search
How to build a successful backlink profile
Importance of consistent local business citations
The basics of online reviews

Ranking Locally

A search with local intent has quite a different results page than a search without local intent. First, let’s look at the anatomy of a local search results page:

The two major pieces that create a local search results page are the local pack and localized organic results. Both have slightly different ranking factors, but this post is specifically about how to get your business into the local pack.

Google takes a zillion things into account when ranking local businesses on the search results page - but let's break it down to the essentials. The chart below is sourced from Moz, a very reputable organization in the digital marketing world. It covers the major “signals” Google looks for when creating the local pack:

We would have to write a book if we wanted to cover each one of these items in detail, but lets review the basics of the most important factors: Google My Business, On-Site Optimizations, Backlinks, Citations and Reviews.

Google My Business

Creating a Google My Business profile is arguably the most impactful tactic you can do with minimal effort to positively impact your local business. A Google My Business listing has the ability to effectively cut out the middleman (a website) between a search and a conversion, as Google My Business allows users to contact your business directly from the search results.

Any business owner can create a Google My Business profile, but if your business has existed for a while, it’s likely that one already exists, and just needs to be claimed.

On-Site Optimizations

There are specific best practices that every local business’s website should follow. Most critically, your site should have an individual page specific to each location your business owns.

There are several pieces that make up a good location page, the basics of which are:

Business name, address and clickable phone number
A map of where your business is located, with the ability for users to request directions
A blurb about the business - what landmarks is it near? What are your popular products or services? Include images from the inside the location as well.
LocalBusiness schema markup

Another best practice for local businesses is ensuring there are local modifiers elsewhere on the site. What are local modifiers? Refer to the example from earlier - “restaurants in columbus”.

The bold text is the local modifier. Make sure these exist naturally in various places across your site: in your page titles, H1s, meta descriptions, etc. And we mean it when we say naturally; don’t keyword stuff - Google will notice.

Building A Successful Backlink Profile

Once you have a Google business listing and a website that supports local search, the next step is to build valuable links to your site that will improve organic search performance. Google refers to these links to understand how reputable your business is within both your community and your industry.

There are a few primary ways to build backlinks to your website that will have a high impact on local search: organization affiliations, business citations, and good old-fashioned public relations.

Affiliations refer to any local organization your business is affiliated with. If you are certified by a major board or part of a community service organization, you can reach out to these organizations to build links back to your website. For example, you may guest-write a blog post on an organization’s website in which you write about your experience of being involved. This is an opportunity to include in a link or two back to your business website in return.

Next, we have link building from business citations: think Yelp, Yellowpages, and Better Business Bureau. Your business may already be listed on those sites, but you may be surprised at the sheer number of additional citations websites out there. Tools like Yext & Moz Local are great for managing these listings at scale. If you’d prefer the less expensive route and practice link building manually, adding your business to sites like Brownbook, Insiderpages or local.com will build quick, valuable links.

Public relations is another way to approach link building. Resources like Help A Reporter Out are great for this method. With this service, you have access to journalists from prominent media outlets that are looking for sources for their stories. If you respond and your response is used in a story, it most often results in a link back to your site.

Consistent Business Citations

Google likes consistency in business information. The more signals you provide to Google that your business is reputable and your contact information is correct the better. Check out our citation scanner to see how your business information currently appears online.

In attempt to provide accurate & consistent data, hundreds of citation sites refer to four main data “aggregators” as a source for business information. Since so many other sites refer to these aggregators, it’s imperative that business information is correct on each. The four main aggregators are Factual, Neustar Localeze, Acxiom and Infogroup. By establishing correct information on these sites, your business will likely appear correctly on a wide network of other citation sites.

Again, Yext & Moz Local are great for managing consistent business information on a number of sites. These tools get your business listed with consistent information across all of the big citation sites, but I wouldn’t stop there. Manually adding your business to niche citation sites (e.g., eyedoctorguide.com if you’re an eye doctor) provides greater value than general listing sites, which will set your strategy apart from businesses with a more laissez-faire approach.

Online Reviews

Up to 85% of web users trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations (source). Valuable offline experiences and customer-centric marketing equates to a more positive online presence.

There are a number of useful tools for soliciting online reviews from customers, but the best way to get online reviews is to make it a priority for every one of your employees. Outstanding customer service paired with a team that knows when and how to request online reviews is the best approach.

In-person is always best when asking for an online review; do this when the customer is checking out. Other methods to consider are including a shortened link to a review site on your receipts or print materials, reaching out via email in a customer newsletter, or embedding a link and call-to-action on your website that goes to one of the big three review sites (Facebook, Yelp & Google).

Conclusion

Optimizing for local takes time and effort to achieve real business growth. While it may be tempting to update your website or Google My Business profile just once and then forget about it, the best results will come when you continually monitor and improve local signals. Taking the time to manually build business citations, write useful web content, and generate positive reviews can significantly impact local search rankings, website traffic, and customer acquisition. With local searches only becoming more prevalent, employing these strategies must be included in your marketing plan.

If you would like to learn more about how Adept can help manage local SEO for your business, get in touch with us.

10 Ways Digital Marketing Has Changed Since 2008

Justin Spring and Danielle Walton — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 19:25:24 GMT

As Adept celebrates its 10th anniversary as a digital marketing agency, co-founders Justin and Danielle reflect on how digital has changed since starting Adept in 2008.

This year, Adept Marketing is celebrating its 10th anniversary as a digital marketing agency. We’re very proud of this, especially considering the statistics say about 20% of small businesses fail within their first year, and 50% by their fifth. Most stunning of all is the fact that only 30% of businesses will make it beyond 10 years in business.

When we started Adept in 2008, Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” was at the top of the charts and The Dark Knight was the highest-grossing film of the year worldwide. Facebook was growing in popularity, but social media channels like Pinterest, Snapchat, and Instagram were not even yet on the horizon. The iPhone was new to the market, and tablets were still a few years away from being released.

In a nutshell, times have changed.

We believe that part of having a vision for the future includes having the ability to look back. So, in honor of our 10th anniversary, we’re looking back at the top 10 changes that have impacted the digital world since 2008.

1. The iPhone

We would be crazy to discuss changes to the digital landscape without mentioning smartphones. Technically, smartphones have been around since 1999, but most would agree that the rapid adoption of the iPhone led to the prevalence of smartphones. In 2008, the first iPhone was only a year old; today, more than a billion iPhones have been sold. Digital marketing now relies heavily on smartphones, to the tune of $143 billion in mobile advertising spend worldwide. Ten years ago, that number was just $1.7 billion.

2. Social Media

In 2008, Facebook had only been released to the public for two years and closed 2007 with 58 million users. Today it has more than 2 billion active users. Twitter had just reached 100 million tweets per quarter, compared with now an average 500 million tweets sent per day. Even crazier, Instagram didn’t exist, and wouldn’t for another two years. Today, there are 2.8 billion global social media users, and the average person spends nearly two hours using social media platforms each day.

3. Artificial Intelligence

AI is revolutionizing the marketing industry, but not because it’s stealing our jobs (it’s not). Rather, virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google have revolutionized the way users search by allowing them to verbally dictate queries to smart speakers rather than manually type. Research predicts that, as soon as 2020, 75% of all U.S. households will own a smart speaker and 50% of all searches will be voice searches. That prediction is particularly mind-blowing, considering that ordering a pizza without ever needing to get out your wallet or phone was literally unthinkable 10 years ago.

4. Video

Video has proven to be a critical medium for bringing brands to life. The data related to video consumption and engagement is astounding, and it shows that the influence of video is only growing. Back in 2008, adults watched an average of 99 minutes of online video per week. Today, adults watch an average of 82 minutes of digital video content per day, or 574 minutes per week.

5. Ecommerce

In 2008, ecommerce sales represented 3.6 percent of total retail sales worldwide. Today, that number is 11.9 percent, and it is expected to grow to 17.5 percent by 2021. This massive growth is reflected in the development of technology and products that accommodate ecommerce sales. For example, WooCommerce, which now makes up 42% of all ecommerce sites on the entire Internet, did not launch until 2011.

6. Streaming

Forget CDs and cable packages: today’s consumers are all about Spotify and Netflix. In 2018, cord-cutting has reached an all time high, but 10 years ago, the source of this phenomenon was only beginning. Though founded in 1997, Netflix only began streaming content digitally in 2007, the same year Hulu was founded. Last April, Netflix announced it has reached 125 million subscribers globally, 45% of which are in the United States. In late 2008, Spotify launched, and since then it has revolutionized the music industry.

7. Google's Search Results Page

Ten years ago, search engine optimization was simply about using specific keywords. Today, it’s about intent: understanding what the searcher wants and building content that solves the problem at hand. This means that businesses seeking to rank well organically must develop smart, useful content that prioritizes the reader over search engine bots. Google has taken steps to change it’s result page to accommodate for user intent. What used to be 10 simple blue links is now a combination of over two dozen types of search result features ranging from the well-known local pack to the ability to estimate your mortgage right in the search results. Google’s ultimate goal continues to be to answer a searchers query as quickly as possible, which means your business must be thinking audience first as well.

8. Google Universal Analytics

Adept has always been focused on listening to the data, but it wouldn’t be until 2012 that Google would release a tool that we’ve come to rely on for data collection & analysis: Universal Analytics. By introducing new features such as cross-channel tracking and easy management of tracking tags, these releases allowed users to paint a fuller picture of data and more easily implement the tracking code required to collect that data. Bottom line: this gives us better insights into the impact of various devices along the path to purchase.

9. Mobile Indexing

The impact of mobile is so vast that we couldn’t limit ourselves to just one change. With mobile usage of search engines only growing, Google is now in the process of rolling out mobile-first indexing. This means websites will be ranked on mobile and desktop results based only on the mobile version of the site. If your site, like 60% of small businesses’ websites, is not mobile-friendly, now is a crucial time to invest in updating the mobile experience so that it is not only responsive, but loads quickly, adjusts formatting for optimized readability, and offers simplified navigation.

10. Inbound Over Outbound

Marketers are prone to using buzzwords. Buzziest of all is the term “inbound marketing,” the growth of which has been exponential since 2008:

Source: Google Trends

In 2008, the outbound tactic of cold calling was second only to referrals as the number one lead generation tactic. Today, 90% of B2B decision makers won’t take a cold call. In response, inbound as a primary marketing strategy for business has grown from 37% in 2008, to approximately 74% this year. On average, today’s businesses rely on inbound programs to generate 60% of their leads. Today’s marketers must think less like an advertiser or salesperson and more like a problem-solver, driving the need to provide value to the customer.

As we get ready to watch another decade go by, it will be interesting to see how each of these 10 trends continue to evolve. If nothing else, this list proves that the way users interact with digital channels and find information online is constantly shifting.

To that end, we’re working on a list of things we expect will impact digital marketing in the future and what you can do to be ready. We plan to release this list later this month as we wrap-up our 10th anniversary celebration. Be sure to come back to the Adept blog to read all about it.

Sources:

Grow Your Business By Thinking Beyond "More and Better Marketing"

jspring@marketingadept.com (Justin Spring) — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 19:03:43 GMT

Adept co-founder Justin Spring discusses why increasing marketing spend without strategy is not the key to business growth.

Originally published in Columbus Business First on May 18, 2018.

H. Igor Ansof (aka the "father of strategic management") wrote in 1957 that “just to retain its relative position, a business firm must go through continuous growth and change. To improve its position, it must grow and change at least twice as fast as that.”

The question then is how do businesses, with limited time, resources and capital, change at least twice as fast as the competition to support unrivaled growth?

At Adept, we talk to 200 companies each year about growth goals, and of these, 80% have a singular path to growth in mind: sell more to new customers in the market they are already in. In other words, the way to grow is to keep doing what they’ve been doing, but do more of it, and better. But is that the best way? Are businesses missing a larger opportunity to grow?

To succeed, an organization must think differently and more strategically, ultimately creating a huge competitive advantage. One way to do this is through the Ansof Matrix, originally published in the Harvard Business Review article “Strategies for Diversification”. Often referred to as the Product/Market Expansion Grid, it is designed to help leaders think through all options for increasing revenue.

Market Penetration, in the lower left quadrant, is the safest of the four options. Here, you focus on expanding sales of your existing product in your existing market.

Go beyond “more and better marketing” by investing in research to better understand exactly how to trigger and influence the customer’s path to purchase.

Product Development, in the lower right quadrant, is slightly riskier, because you're creating a new product for your existing market.

Go beyond “more and better marketing” here by identifying something you know your customers need that you can provide better than your competition.

With Market Development, in the upper left quadrant, you're selling an existing product into an entirely new market. This dramatically increases your total addressable market giving you more room to grow.

Go beyond “more and better marketing” by modifying your product to appeal to a new market or find a new use for your product in another market.

Diversification, in the upper right quadrant, has the most risk because you’re bringing a new, untested product into an entirely new market.

Go beyond “more and better marketing” by assembling a team focused on innovation that could bring a new product to market.

The 20% of companies we see that have a defined growth strategy, or that work with Adept to create one, are typically growing at the fastest pace. In my experience, combining a strategic plan with more and better marketing is the one-two punch that generates the most meaningful results – both top line revenue and bottom line profit.

Get in touch to learn how Adept can work with your company to build a growth plan.